Cover of Slave Revolt on Screen by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall / credit: University of Mississippi Press
Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games by Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021)
Chris Rock’s 2014 film “Top Five” is a scathing critique of Hollywood and its sometimes open, sometimes underhanded censorship of critical movies. Rock’s character, “Andre Allen,” emerges as a movie star because of his role as the ridiculous, crime fighting “Hammy the Bear.” Resentful of being known for only this goofy role, Allen produces a film called “Uprize,” playing the role of the Haitian rebel vodou priest, Dutty Boukman. However, “Top Five” grossed $25 million, while the animated film, “Madagascar,” in which Chris Rock played “Marty the Zebra,” netted $200 million. This shows the powers that be have no interest in amplifying the message of arguably the single most important event of the 19th century: The enslaved can rebel and they can win!
“Top Five” was used as an example in the recently published book, Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games. In it, historian Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall explores how the 1804 Haitian Revolution has been misrepresented and censored on screen.
Poster for 2013 film, “Tula: The Revolt”
For example, funding was blocked for an epic film, “Tula: The Revolt,” which highlighted the mass revolt and its forward-thinking leadership, namely Toussaint L’ouverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe, Sanite Bélair and Capois La Mort. Starring actor Danny Glover, the film sought to answer the question: “Why has this monumental achievement been so erased from our history and from our consciousness?” Sepinwall writes the film aimed to suggest “enslaved people were capable of formulating their own resistance plans” (p. 53). However, Glover was unsuccessful in raising funds to produce the film at the level other Hollywood films have been produced.
It is here that Karl Marx’s 1848 quote-turned-maxim is more relevant than any other: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.”
Beyond a Great White Hope
Sepinwall contrasts the different historiographies that guided both mainstream, underground, and unfinished and unfunded films.
Poster for 1948 film, “Lydia Bailey”
McCarthyism acted to dilute producers’ ability to convey a new image of Haiti and Black leadership in the 1948 film, “Lydia Bailey.” After years of censorship as well as calling key actors and producers, such as Michael Blankfort and William Marshall, to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the film became a shadow of its former self when it finally hit the screen.
Poster for 1933 film, “Emperor Jones”
Paul Robeson’s role in “Emperor Jones” (1933) is severely curtailed by racism, causing one African-American critic to call Eugene O’Neill’s play “a travesty of the Negro race” (p. 29).
A major thread in this book is Hollywood’s insistence on having a “great white hope” character who paternalistically shows the enslaved how to fight. The professor cites “Burn” (1969) and the French miniseries, “Toussaint L’ouverture” (2012), as but two examples.
The elite of Hollywood always sent a clear message: They would never endorse a film depicting revolutionary violence against the white slave-owning class, lest this generation of Toussaints, Jean Jacques and Cecile Fatimans are inspired to emulate this historical example of reclaiming their own self-determination.
Poster for 2012 film, “Toussaint L’ouverture”
Chapter 7, “Haitian Reflections of the Revolution’s Legacy,” is perhaps the most politically problematic and imbalanced chapter in the book. The four films Sepinwall reviews are “Dimanche 4 Janvier (Sunday January 4th),” “Moloch Tropical,” “GNB v. Attila” and “Haiti, la fin des chimeres (Haiti, the End of the Thugs).” They all share an anti-Aristide bent. This is curious considering Roger Noriega, the Clintons, the Bushes, the U.S. State Department and U.S. intelligence services always shared this same worldview against Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide, twice orchestrating coups against his government and kidnapping him (See “Aristide: The Endless Revolution,” 2005).
The Role of Video Games
The California State professor’s final chapters make the case that what has been banned on the big screen has reached millions through a most unlikely medium: Video games. Sepinwell reviews “Playing History 2—Slave Trade” (2013) and “Freedom!” (1992) as examples of video games that are “callous approaches to the subject” of slavery and revolution (p. 186). She reviews “Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry” (2013) and the work of Muriel Tramis and Patrick Chamoiseau as “counterhegemonic commemorations of slavery” (p. 207).
Screenshot from video game “Assassin’s Creed” / credit: GameSpot
Haiti is again trending, for all of the wrong, stereotypical and racist reasons. The mainstream media incessantly using terms like “crisis-ridden,” “helpless,” “pitiful” and “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” are nauseating for those who understand the only break Haiti needs is from U.S. imperialism. At this critical time, Sepinwall’s scholarly study has a great deal to teach us about those who have used cinema to challenge age-old white supremacist views on Haiti.
Just as Chris Rock’s character, “Andre Allens,” seeks to emerge from under and from within white supremacy, so too does an entire history that culminated in 1804, a history that—more than ever—threatens to unlock answers for the future.
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels to Haiti to stay with the mass anti-imperialist movement. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.
United Nations peacekeepers from Brazil conduct a security patrol in Cité Soleil, Haiti, during the second round of senatorial elections in 2009 / credit: United Nations
Editor’s Note: The following opinion was originally published in Black Agenda Report.
It is an exhilarating time for the “leftists” of the Americas. This past week, at the 77th meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, leader after Latin American leader made grand statements against U.S. and Western imperialism, the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, the violations of human rights, and the West’s assault on the sovereignty of smaller nations. Colombia’s brand-new president, Gustavo Petro, made an impassioned plea against the genocidal “War on Drugs.” Cuba’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Bruno Eduardo Rodríguez Parrilla, rejected the attacks on the sovereignty of China and Russia. Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carlos Faría railed against the Western sanctions against Nicaragua, Cuba, Iran and Russia. Honduran President Xiomara Castro demanded that the United States stop its attempts at destabilizing her country and strongly pushed against Western policies of intervention in the region. Nicaragua’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Denis Ronaldo Moncada Colindres, made perhaps the most explosive claims when he stated :
“The assault, the robbery, the disgraceful abominable depredation, the looting and the genocides unleashed by the colonialists and imperialists of the Earth, are the real crimes and they are the real criminals against humanity, and we denounce this… It’s time to say enough to hypocritical imperialism that politicizes, falsifies and denigrates the very human rights which they themselves violate and deny on a daily basis.”
Most of these leaders spoke to the urgent question of Cuba, calling for the lifting of the economic blockade against the country and for Cuba’s removal from the U.S.-created list of countries that supposedly “sponsor terrorism.”
Yet, for all the eloquent denunciations of imperialism and the impassioned defenses of Latin American and Caribbean sovereignty and independence, one country was conspicuously avoided: Haiti. Not a single one of these countries applied their critiques of imperialism to Haiti. Sure, Cuba and Venezuela mentioned Haiti. Cuba’s representative called for reparations for the Caribbean for slavery, said that humanity owed a debt to the Haitian revolution, and stressed that Haiti needed international support “through a special contribution for its reconstruction and development.” Venezuela’s representative name-dropped Haiti within a list of countries, which have suffered bloodshed from “imperialism and supremacism.”
Beyond the casual mentions, the hollow rhetorics, and the empty invocations, there were no concrete critiques of the current imperial machinations in Haiti—of Haiti’s complete loss of sovereignty through the ongoing destruction of the Haitian state apparatus, of the current occupation of the country by the Western-led Core Group, and of the repression (and violent misrepresentation) of the Haitian people as they have taken to the streets to demand their sovereignty and call for an end to foreign intervention. Instead, the extension and intensification of foreign intervention appears to be the strategic end goal of not only the usual suspects of the West, but our supposed Leftist allies in the Americas.
One has to ask: Do the leaders of the region even know what has been going on in Haiti? Surely they know about the 2004 U.S./Canada/France-led coup d’etat against Haiti’s democratically elected president, and the Chapter 7 deployment of a United Nations occupation force (euphemistically known as a “peacekeeping” force). Indeed, it was Lula’s Brazil that led the military wing of that occupation that brought nothing but violence and devastation to Haitian peoples. Brazil’s active participation in that occupation led to the migration of thousands of Haitian workers to Brazil, where they provided cheap labor to build the infrastructure for the Olympics and World Cup. The savage racism experienced by Haitian migrants in Brazil, combined with the disappearance of work, led them to flee overland through Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum.
The leaders of the Americas must also know about the Core Group—the self-selected, unelected group of foreigners, with representatives from the European Union, the United States, Brazil, Canada, that was created during the early months of the occupation. The Core Group continues to control Haiti’s internal political affairs. They certainly know that the UN still occupies Haiti; after all, it is the left’s “anti-imperialist” darling, Andrés Manual López Obrador (AMLO), who is serving, along with the United States, as “co-penholder” and writing the UN Security Council’s imperial policies on Haiti. Similar to Brazil, will Mexico’s bid to play power-broker in the region come at the expense of Haitian people and Haiti’s sovereignty?
AMLO must know what he’s doing. After all, even as it gets celebrated for its “leftist” credentials, the Mexican government continues to collude with the U.S. Border Patrol to militarize its southern border against migrants, and enforce the U.S. “Remain in Mexico” policy. Meanwhile, Haitian and other Black migrants continue to suffer racist abuse in Mexico.
It is not lost on me that there is a deep-seated, racist view of Haiti as exceptional—and therefore exceptionally difficult to engage. The constant refrain from anti-imperialist groupings in the West is that Haiti is so “complex” and its sociopolitical terrain so difficult that there’s no way to truly understand what’s going on there. During a recent webinar against U.S. imperialism in Latin America, I brought up the current UN/US occupation in Haiti, only to have the host soberly agree with me that this was, indeed, an important problem to engage, but that, perhaps, Haiti needed a separate webinar. Many webinars later, discussion of Haiti’s destruction by a brutal Western imperialism, continues to get short shrift.
While we celebrate the rise of another “Pink Tide” in Latin America, the emergence of a truly multipolar world, with new economic and political alignments, it seems clear that Haiti will continue to be on the outside of “leftist” imaginations—beyond, of course, the non-specific words of “solidarity” thrown its way.
In a discussion on Twitter about the ways that Haiti appears— and dismissed—in global discourses, a colleague, Vik Sohonie lamented , “Haiti is unfortunately where all good will, solidarity, and Third Worldism goes to die… The ‘international community’ that occupies it, as you know, is Nepali, Brazilian. You get looked at funny elsewhere in the Carib if you compliment Haiti. It’s astonishing.” He’s not wrong. One of the reasons that the brutal UN military occupation of Haiti could fly under the radar was because it was populated by a multi-national and multi-racial military and civilian force. The United States admitted as much, as revealed in the Wikileaks files. Former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti Janet Sanderson lauded the occupation force (MINUSTAH) as a cheap source of U.S. power in Haiti, as it is made up of a multinational coalition of Western and non-Western forces, including countries ranging from Benin and Kenya to Brazil and Ecuador, who seem all bent on using Haiti as their training ground.
Why is it so easy for these nonwhite and oppressed nations to come and serve U.S. and Western imperial interests in Haiti? Could it be that they, too, have imbibed the dehumanized and, frankly, racist views about Haitian people? Is Haiti’s Blackness seen as the root cause of its problems and struggles—even by many Black people? One would think so if one reviewed the recent actions of the leaders of CARICOM who, also, deploy the dehumanizing language and white supremacist assumptions about Haiti that is the foundation of Western imperialist actions in the country.
This wasn’t always the case, of course. Back in 2004, under the leadership of PJ Patterson, CARICOM at least spoke up against the U.S./France/Canada coup d’etat against elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide (and this was despite his often problematic public positions against him). Jamaica was even threatened with sanctions—by the Bush administration’s Condoleeza Rice—if it attempted to provide Aristide asylum. The other bold voice was Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, who railed against the coup and later provided direct support to Haiti’s masses through the PetroCaribe fuel subsidies.
Where are those voices now?
Perhaps if people in the region saw Haiti less as an abstraction and more as a place with real humans, citizens of the world, with the same claims to rights and livelihood, confronting a white supremacist imperialism, they would recognize the current denial of its sovereignty. Until that time, the Leftists of the Americas are betraying a people that have given so much to the struggles for sovereignty and independence in the region.
Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a Black Studies and anthropology professor at UCLA.
Clockwise from top right: Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell holding an alleged vial of anthrax powder obtained from Iraq that he later admitted to be false; members of the U.S. Congress wearing Kente cloth (bottom right); Black Agenda Report founding executive editor Glen Ford (left); and the cover of Ford’s book, The Black Agenda (center)
The Black Agendaby Glen Ford (OR Books: New York and London, 2021)
Tomorrow, July 28, marks the 1-year anniversary of the passing of Glen Ford, founding executive editor of Black Agenda Report (BAR), an independent online publication that aims to provide “news, commentary and analysis from the Black left.”
Before Ford died at 71, he was able to publish a selection of his articles as a book, The Black Agenda.
While reading, I highlighted words and phrases Ford invented to help burn the impact of injustice into people’s minds. If he wanted to, he could have published a dictionary of the new vocabulary. It is that numerous.
He made clear in his writings it was not enough to be against injustice. One had to explain it in a way so people would be inspired to organize a liberation movement. In Ford’s case, he was trying to encourage poor and working-class Black people to struggle against the “Black misleadership class,” a group of turncoat Black people who had aligned with the ruling class. Ford viewed former U.S. President Barack Obama and many Black members of the U.S. Congress as working against the interests of the 48 million people of African descent in the United States and the close to 2 billion Africans throughout the world.
Take, for example, what Ford wrote in a 2020 article left out of the book. In it, he compared the relationship the Black misleadership class has with white capital to a toxic marriage one would see in a soap opera. He dubbed that fictional soap opera, “The Black and the Powerless,” in a play on the long-running CBS mid-day drama, “The Young and the Restless.” I cackled at his wit.
“Black misleadership class” has been associated with Ford. But he and other BAR contributors only popularized it, he said. Writer James Warren first used the term in 2005 in Black Commentator, another publication Ford co-founded before leaving to launch BAR with others (page 56).
In advocating for the 72 percent of the Black population that is poor and working class, he wrote in a piece published a few months before Obama was elected (page 33):
Slow-acting Katrinas in the form of gentrification are what Black folks can expect—and must find ways to resist and defeat—from the ruling Lords of Capital for the foreseeable future, Obama or no Obama. There will be no “age” named after the handsome, articulate, and oh-so-slick but otherwise ordinary corporate candidate for president who used to call himself Barry. This is the Age of Katrina, and Barry is part of the problem.
‘Bifurcated Brain’
A child of communists, Ford grew up surrounded by his Irish mother’s door-to-door grassroots activism in New Jersey and his father, the first Black host of a non-religious television program in Georgia. In a 2013 interview with journalist Paul Jay, Ford said those experiences aided in developing his “bifurcated brain.” That might explain Ford’s ability to merge the art of storytelling with a revolutionary conscience.
“Glen Ford is irreplaceable not just because his writing was so sharp and so clear,” BAR co-founder Margaret Kimberley wrote in the foreword to the book (page xii), “but also because his politics were so clearly of the left. He was not a liberal, or a Democrat, or a progressive. He was a Marxist, and he brought that ideology to all that he did. In doing so he revealed important information that is regularly disregarded or disappeared. He also had a talent for making every issue understandable and making connections with the reality of people’s lives.”
After stints in the U.S. Army, on the radio in rural Georgia, writing for the daily newspaper of the Communist Party of the United States, and helping out the Black Panther Party’s Jersey City chapter in New Jersey, Ford led and/or launched several efforts in radio, TV, print, and online. The most memorable feat appears to be the 2006 co-founding of Black Agenda Report.
Blueprint for Liberation
In Ford’s writing, everything is minced and fried up for consumption. Once I start reading one of his articles, I follow it all the way, tickled at the imagery he uses and his climactic endings. For example, chew on phrases like:
Black Prison Nation (referring to the 2 million incarcerated Black people)
Black American Gulag (referring to U.S. policies that led to mass incarceration)
ObamaL’aid (like Kool Aid)
Bernie-bear (referring to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders)
Old Man Biden (referring to U.S. President Joe Biden)
Great Corporate Black Hope (that’s referring to U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris)
Ford’s depth of analysis and the breadth of topics he analyzed is awe-inspiring, too. How could someone know so much about… so much? Because the man did not get distracted. Plus, he was an internationalist. And so, Ford could go from the U.S. invasion of Iraq to the surge of Western-armed jihadists into Syria, and the NATO invasion of Libya, the corporate takeover of Black Lives Matter, reparations for Black people, Hurricane Katrina’s impact on Black people, the Detroit hijacking of pensions, the origins of “Thanksgiving,” billionaires and millionaires running for elected office, Occupy Wall Street, and much more.
Journalists like Ford are hard to find. Not only does it not pay to tell the truth, some journalists risk their lives doing so (check out Mumia Abu-Jamal, Julian Assange and Shireen Abu Akleh). And so, Ford led a humble existence, as one of his friends told me.
In the final piece compiled for The Black Agenda, Ford paid tribute to George Floyd, the Black man whom Minneapolis police murdered in 2020. It led to the largest popular uprising in U.S. history. But because of his political training, Ford included a blueprint for liberation in searing language (page 326):
Community control is how we build socialism within the framework of people’s right to self-determination—the principles by which, along with solidarity, we decolonize and dis-imperialize our world. “Power to the People” means disempowering the capitalist and white supremacist. Everything else is a diversion, conjured up by the Kente cloth-soiling Black misleadership class in service to their bosses, the oligarchs. They have betrayed us repeatedly and laughed at our willingness to trust them yet again. In George Floyd’s name, let this be the end of it.
May more people be inspired to do the honest journalism Ford modeled.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, by Dan Kovalik (Hot Books: New York, 2021)
Academic and activist Dan Kovalik’s new book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture, was written on the frontlines of the twin struggles of our time, the class struggle and the fight for Black liberation. Reading it brought me back to so many magical and contradictory movement moments that I could not resist writing a review.
‘White People Go to the Back of the March’
On the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day in 2017, thousands of protesters took to Fifth Avenue and the frigid streets of New York City to demand criminal charges against the police who murdered Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge; Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota; and hundreds of other unarmed Black and brown men. Some Black Lives Matter march marshals had determined that Black and brown families and activists—presented as the only real victims and fighters—would march in the front. White people—presented as all equal benefactors of white supremacy and white privilege—were assigned to march in the back, separated from the youthful, militant front. It was a strange scene. Forty-nine years after the U.S. state assassinated Dr. King for risking his life to organize a multiracial movement against white supremacy—and in his final months, a Poor People’s Campaign against the capitalist system—surely he would find it curious we no longer needed outright white supremacists like Bull Connor or George Wallace; we were now capable of segregating our own marches.
Malcolm X’s only meeting with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on March 26, 1964, during the U.S. Senate debates regarding the (eventual) Civil Rights Act of 1964 / credit: Marion Trikosko
So many questions leapt into my mind as my eyes traced the 10-block-long protest. Where did poor whites belong? Veterans? Whites who had been through the prison system? How about Black students who had both parents in a position to pay their tuition out of pocket at NYU or Columbia? They had all earned the front? Then there was my Ernesto Rafael, my son, half Dominican, half poor-white, harassed by the police too many times in the Bronx. Where did he “belong,” according to the marshals?
This was but one example of the new racial dynamics on display across the country in the BLM movement from Oakland to Boston, and everywhere in between. For class conscious revolutionaries throwing down in the heart of this mass movement, it represented a series of fresh, unique challenges.
When I picked up Kovalik’s new book, I was intrigued by his biting class analysis of the similar experiences he had. In chapter 2, “Cancellation of a Peace Activist,” he writes directly about being a participant on the frontlines of the BLM movement in Pennsylvania, ducking and dodging police batons as organizers collectively figured out their next strategic moves. Kovalik, a union and human rights lawyer and professor, based out of Pittsburgh, dives deep into the contradictions he and so many others experienced. Kovalik slams both the arrogance of isolated white anarchists whose faux militancy puts all protesters at risk, as well as the bullying tactics and racial reductionism of some radical liberals. This took me back to the explosion of protests following the police murders of Eric Garner and Michael Brown in 2014, which brought millions of people into the streets to denounce the epidemic of police terror in Black and brown communities. Millions were in motion and different political tendencies vied for leadership. Kovalik examines key lessons to be drawn from the almost decade of collective experience we have as a movement in what came to be known as “Black Lives Matter.” This is but one must-read chapter in Kovalik’s exciting new book.
Woke Capitalism
Kovalik’s book is an expose of Woke Capitalism and the cancer of cancel culture.
While millions took to the streets to stop President George W. Bush from invading Iraq, the peace movement was eerily silent when Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, became “the drone-warrior-in-chief, dropping at least 26,171 bombs in 2016 alone.” (pg. 109) He critiques the peace movement for going quiet every time a Democrat is (s)elected to the oval office.
Dan Kovalik’s book, Cancel This Book: The Progressive Case Against Cancel Culture (2021)
This page-turner exposes today’s liberal establishment, which touts “racial equity” without ever questioning the underlying structure that intensifies white supremacist control of society’s institutions. David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is but one example of a liberal who bloviates over the U.S. Capitol rioters and their violent methods. Yet, he advocated for the bombing, sacking and recolonization of Iraq. (pg. VIII) The book exposes corporate and campus departments that pay hefty salaries to “experts” to lecture on “racial justice” without ever touching the structures that buttress white supremacy and racial and class segregation. These defenders of racial capitalism—from the academy to the pressroom—give political cover to hucksters, who make a killing by bullying white liberals into forking over money, lest they be labeled racist. As one class-conscious scholar sarcastically asks in Black Agenda Report: Do we really “wonder why these rural voters didn’t just go to their local Barnes and Noble to purchase a copy of How to Be an Anti-racist before the election?” Are all of the books that have emerged from the White Privilege Industrial Complex reaching that mass of “deplorables,” whom Arlie Hochchild refers to in her monumental sociological exposé as “strangers in their own land”? (“Own land” as in stolen Indigenous land).
Kovalik takes on the Frankenstein-esque outgrowth of cancellations in academic institutions and beyond, asking what are the political forces behind them? He offers the real-life example of the canceling of Molly Rush, an octogenarian peace activist who reposted a quote that took on a life of its own. Instead of speaking with her face to face to clear the air, internet activists dragged her down and expelled her from the movement, like a group of pre-teens playing a game of Telephone. (pg. 13) Kovalik surmises that many keyboard warriors who have never stared down police lines or even handed out a flyer don’t want dialogue and growth. They want to score woke points and “likes” to the detriment of other comrades.
Liberal bully politics short-changes us all. Kovalik takes a big leap to the international realm to examine the West’s arrogant dismissal of Cuban medical internationalism, the Russian Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine and China’s success controlling the COVID-19 pandemic. China had two deaths in 2021. Kovalik concludes:
“It simply boggles the mind how the mainstream media and the Democratic Party elite are willing to compromise world peace and public health all in the interest of political gain. In so doing, they have taken ‘cancel culture’ to the very extreme, and they may get us all canceled, permanently, in the process…” (pg. 139)
A sit-in protest on July 8, 2016, in San Francisco in response to the Alton Sterling shooting / credit: Pax Ahimsa Gethen
We Never Give Up on Our People
It’s a new era. One tweet-turned-Twitter-game-of-telephone can ruin a comrade’s life.
How does the state operate online? How do anarchists operate online? When do they intermingle? Any anonymous account can start a smear campaign against any public figure.
This book invites us to ask: If we cancel every last screw-up, addict and lumpenized scroundrel, who will absorb the body blows needed to bob and weave forward in the class struggle?
When in history has another social class organized, led and defended a revolution? The petite-bourgeoisie blows with the wind. Who will be left? Who is willing to put in that work? Who knows hell well enough not to fear it? Nicaraguan national hero Augusto Sandino said, “Only the workers and peasants will make it all the way.” Kovalik is not turning his back and giving up on the potential cadre of the future. Will you?
A Boston police mug shot of Malcolm X, following his arrest for larceny in 1944
As Marxists, revolutionaries and anti-imperialists, we believe nothing is permanent; everything is in a state of flux. The watchwords are growing through contradictions among the people, healing and restorative justice. We don’t have the luxury of discarding comrades. There has to be a path back or we risk cannibalizing and condemning our own ranks. Who would Malcolm X have been if everyone had given up on him in his 20s, when he was imprisoned? How many young Bobbies, Hueys and Assatas are sidelined right now? How can we be less judgemental and give people opportunities to learn from their mistakes?
The Other White America
Black and Brown people in the United States, and those in solidarity with the Black Liberation Movement, have every right to be angry. But angry at whom?
Most white people are not CEOs or members of the ruling class; many more are National Guard soldiers, correction officers and other reactionary rent-a-cops, the overseers of a society divided between the haves and the have-nots. But the racial portrait of state repression is more complicated. Fifty-eight percent of the Atlanta police force is Black. Over half of Washington, D.C.’s police force is Black.
A liberal portrait of white privilege fails to tell the full class story in the United States. Seventy million people received Medicaid in 2016—43 percent were white. Of 43 million food stamp recipients that year, 36.2 percent were white. Over 100,000 overdoses took place in the past year. The overwhelming majority of opioid overdoses occur among poor whites, roughly 72 percent. Are these cast-off layers of our class our enemies?
A demonstrator raising awareness of the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in April 2015 / credit: Voice of America
Kovalik points out that similar to white people, “the top 10 percent of Black households hold 75 percent of Black wealth.” (pg. 96) Is every brother your brother?
Given the complex class and racial terrain, do we cast poor and working-class whites away as “a basket of deplorables” or do win them over to defend their class interests? Wouldn’t sticking all white protesters in the back of marches with more yuppified layers only alienate them more? Is the movement a “safe space” for them, or more importantly a revolutionizing space?
Cancel This Book refuses to give up on the other white America—the poor, forgotten and de-industrialized “oxy-electorate” (writer Kathleen Frydl’s term for white people who live in the U.S. Rust Belt, where OxyContin addictions are on the rise). Those white people are full of disappointment and hatred for this system—between the tens of millions who refused to vote for another neoliberal Dixiecrat like Hillary Clinton, and the tens of millions of others who were duped into believing a spoiled, trash-talking, billionaire, real-estate mogul hoax and punk with infinite air time was their white knight.
As Malcolm X taught: “The truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it is against the oppressor.” We can win over workers who have only ever known the american-dreaming chauvinism they have been fed. Bursting with ideological perspicacity and revolutionary hope, this book pushes us not to get caught up in the liberal webs of identity politics and call-out culture.
Kovalik also challenges the white liberals who unknowingly acted as “masochists at the protests.” This constructive critique is not meant to take away from anyone’s hard work and real contributions. Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) was one outgrowth of these liberal politics, which relegated many well-intentioned, liberal, student and petite-bourgeoisie (“middle-class”) whites to cheerleader positions. Is this the militant mass-movement that is going to stand up to the State Department, the Pentagon, the police and the intelligence agencies? When Malcolm held up white abolitionist John Brown’s life as an example of real struggle to follow, he was challenging these liberal politics.
Amidst the ever-evolving dialectics of our movement, Kovalik’s book comes as a breath of fresh air. It is a clarion call about the damage we are collectively doing to our movement if we do not center class politics next to the need for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people.
Danny Shaw is a professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at the City University of New York. He frequently travels within the Americas region. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Hemispheric Affairs, Danny is fluent in Haitian Kreyol, Spanish, Portuguese and Cape Verdean Kriolu.